1/23/2010 9:23:29 AM of the The Journal Polynesian Society Polynesian VOLUME 118 No.4 VOLUME DECEMBER 2009 SOCIETY THE POLYNESIAN THE AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY OF NEW ZEALAND
THE JOURNAL OF THE POLYNESIAN SOCIETY VOLUME 118 No.4 DECEMBER 2009 COVRDECR.indd 1 THE JOURNAL OF THE POLYNESIAN SOCIETY
Volume 118 DECEMBER 2009 Number 4
Editor JUDITH HUNTSMAN
Review Editor LYN CARTER
Editorial Assistants JUDITH MACDONALD DOROTHY BROWN
Published quarterly by the Polynesian Society (Inc.), Auckland, New Zealand Published in New Zealand by the Polynesian Society (Inc.)
Copyright © 2009 by the Polynesian Society (Inc.)
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Inquiries should be made to:
Hon. Secretary The Polynesian Society c/- Mäori Studies The University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland
ISSN 0032-4000
Indexed in CURRENT CONTENTS, Behavioural, Social and Managerial Sciences, in INDEX TO NEW ZEALAND PERIODICALS, and in ANTHROPOLOGICAL INDEX.
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Volume 118 DECEMBER 2009 Number 4
CONTENTS
Notes and News ...... 309
Emeritus Professor Roger Curtis Green (1932-2009) ONZM, FRSNZ, Member Nat. Acad. Sci.(USA), Hon. Fellow Soc. Antiquaries (London). Obituary by Janet Davidson ...... 311
Articles
MERATA KAWHARU Ancestral Landscapes and World Heritage from a Mäori Viewpoint ... 317
ROGER G. SWEARINGEN A Tale of Two Tapa: Their History, Legend and Celebrity Ownership by Robert Louis Stevenson ...... 339
Shorter Communications
ROGER NEICH Tutauru, the Adze of Ngahue in Myth and History ...... 361
ROGER NEICH AND STUART PARK A Detailed Provenance for Kawe, the Nukuoro Figure Carving in Auckland Museum ...... 369
Review Article
Recent Books about Rapanui GRANT McCALL ...... 377 Reviews
Butler, S.R., 2008: Contested Representations: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa. ELIZABETH RANKIN ...... 385
Munro, Doug: The Ivory Tower and Beyond: Participant Historians of the Pacific. HAZEL PETRIE ...... 387
Trnka, Susanne: State of Suffering. Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji. STEVEN RATUVA ...... 389
Walker, Ranginui: Tohunga Whakairo: Paki Harrison. The Story of a Master Carver. ROBERT JAHNKE ...... 392
Publications Received ...... 395
Correspondence from JIM WILLIAMS and SUSAN HEALY ...... 396
Publications of the Polynesian Society ...... 398 NOTES AND NEWS
Note from the Hon. Editor In light of Roger Swearingen’s story about two tapa connected to Robert Louis Stevenson, RLS’s brief membership in the Polynesian Society is worthy of note. On 23 September 1893, Stevenson was elected to membership of the Polynesian Society as its 178th member. However, shortly over a year later the Journal noted, “With great regret we have to record the loss of another of our members—Robert Louis Stevenson—who died at Apia, Samoa, on the 13th December, 1894.”
Contributors to This Issue Merata Kawharu is Director of the James Henare Mäori Research Centre at The University of Auckland. Merata studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and graduated with a doctorate in social anthropology in 1998. Since then, she has been involved in research on claims under the Treaty of Waitangi for tribal groups throughout New Zealand. She has also worked on Mäori development research in areas including resource management, leadership, governance and education. More recently, she has been working on issues concerning indigeneity and World Heritage. Her most recent publication, Tahuhu Korero: The Sayings of Taitokoerau, combines her interests in heritage, identity and traditional knowledge. She is a member of the Mäori Heritage Council and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust Board, and has worked on heritage issues, nationally and internationally. Roger Neich recently retired after 23 years as the Curator of Ethnology at Auckland Museum. He continues to serve as a Research Associate at the Museum. His paired major publications Painted Histories: Early Mäori Figurative Painting (1994/2001) and Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngäti Tarawhai Woodcarving (2004) were published by Auckland University Press. Working with the Museum’s collections he has produced Pacific Jewellery and Adornment (2004 with Fuli Pereira) and Pacific Tapa (1997 with Mick Pendergrast) and other volumes, illustrated by Krzysztof Pfeiffer’s photographs. He is currently working on an annotated catalogue of the British Museum’s Mäori collection and completing his study of the English collector James Edge-Partington. Stuart Park has been the Northland Area Manager for New Zealand Historic Places Trust since 1999. Before that he held, among other roles, the position of General Manager Museum Resources at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand in Wellington from 1993. His earlier positions were as the Director of the Auckland Museum (1979-93) and Anthropologist at the Otago Museum (1968-79). Roger G. Swearingen is best known for his authoritative guide to the writing and publication of Stevenson’s many prose works, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (1980), and the entry on Stevenson in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (2000). His most recent publication is an inclusive, “Recent Studies in Robert Louis Stevenson... 1970–2005”, a two-part review of research published in Dickens Studies Annual, 37-38 (2006-07). He is now finishing a full- length scholarly biography for Faber and Faber Publishers, London, titled Robert Louis Stevenson: Spirit of Adventure.
309 310 Notes & News
JPS Online The following press announcement (slightly abridged) was issued by The University of Auckland Library on 2 September 2009: After seven years’ work, The University of Auckland Library and the Polynesian Society are proud to announce the completion of their project to digitise the first 100 years of the Journal of the Polynesian Society. Volumes 1-100 (1892-1992) are now freely available here at
Roger Green was one of the pre-eminent scholars of Pacific prehistory of his generation. His career in the Pacific spanned over 50 years and he was still writing and publishing up until his death. He is renowned for his prodigious publication output but, equally importantly, he is remembered for his generosity and his support for his colleagues and for young and emerging scholars. His influence on Pacific prehistory has been extraordinary. Roger was born in New Jersey. His passion for archaeology was already apparent by the age of 11. His father died suddenly when Roger was 16 and his mother moved the family (Roger and his two sisters) to Albuquerque in New Mexico, believing that this would advance his interest in archaeology. He began his career, therefore, in Southwestern Archaeology, taking undergraduate degrees in both geology and anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He gained a scholarship to Harvard, where he came under the influence of Gordon Willey and Douglas Oliver. It was Oliver who introduced him to the Pacific. In 1958 Roger came to New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, visiting Honolulu en route. During 1958 and 1959 he spent nine months attached to the Anthropology Department at what was then Auckland University College. During this period, he carried out his first small New Zealand excavations at Tairua and Orongo Bay, participated in Jack Golson’s excavations at Sarah’s Gully, and involved himself in the development of the New Zealand Archaeological Association’s Site Recording Scheme. He then embarked on an 18-month period of tropical Pacific fieldwork in Mo‘orea in the Society Islands, as part of Oliver’s ongoing research there, and in Mangareva, where he was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Although the Mo‘orea project was modest in scope compared with Roger’s later programmes, it embodied several strands that would characterise much of his work: a settlement pattern approach learned from Willey, an ethnohistorical approach learned from Oliver, the thorough publication of basic data in monograph form, and the careful archiving of collections and records so that they would be accessible to future researchers. In 1961 Roger returned to Auckland as Lecturer in Prehistory at the University, where he worked for most of the rest of his life, with sabbaticals in Hawai‘i and elsewhere, and interludes at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu (1967-70) and as the first New Zealand Government James Cook Fellow, based at the Auckland Institute and Museum (1970-73). Teaching was an integral and important part of his work and he was probably happiest in a university environment. In Auckland, Roger found a congenial academic environment in a small Anthropology Department with colleagues such as linguist Bruce Biggs and social anthropologist and ethno-biologist Ralph Bulmer. His first six years Roger Curtis Green 313 in the Auckland department were a period of extraordinary energy. He did a final season of fieldwork in Mo‘orea and steered the resulting monograph to publication while he was carrying out his next big tropical field research project in Western Samoa (1963-67). In New Zealand, he directed small but significant field projects, pioneered the sourcing and dating of obsidian, and took a major role in the New Zealand Archaeological Association and its early attempts to secure better preservation for New Zealand archaeological sites. It was at this time that he drew together the disparate data from nearly a decade of research by various people in Auckland and the Coromandel Peninsula in a completely new theoretical framework, to produce The Prehistoric Sequence of the Auckland Province. This work, both controversial and influential at the time, was accepted by Harvard as his long delayed doctoral dissertation. The brief two and a half year period in Hawai‘i (1967-70) was, if possible, even more demanding, as Roger taught courses at the University of Hawai‘i, directed a major research project in the Mäkaha Valley, and took part in the development of other major projects in the Hälawa Valley on Moloka‘i and Lapakahi on Hawai‘i. He was the driving force behind the influential Wenner-Gren funded Sigatoka conference on Oceanic Culture History in 1969. The Mäkaha project broke new ground in Hawai‘i as a major contract investigation funded entirely by private sources, and the resulting publications justified Roger’s view that contract archaeology, done well, can make a major contribution to the professional literature. The James Cook Fellowship enabled Roger, with co-leader Doug Yen, the New Zealand ethno-botanist then at the Bishop Museum, to launch the first stage of his third and most ambitious Pacific field programme in the Southeast Solomon Islands (1970-72). This was a truly interdisciplinary programme, including historical as well as prehistoric archaeology, linguistics, and studies of social relations, agricultural systems, and art. The discovery of Lapita sites in Santa Cruz and the Reef Islands led Roger to develop a focus on Lapita in all its aspects. The Solomons project and its ramifications played a major part in his research for the rest of his career. In 1973, at the conclusion of the Cook Fellowship, Roger accepted a Personal Chair in the University of Auckland Anthropology Department, which he held until his early retirement in 1992. He was Professor Emeritus until his death. He master-minded the second stage of the Southeast Solomon Islands Project in the late 1970s from the Auckland department. In the 1980s, his own fieldwork was scaled down as his health deteriorated, although he continued to participate in the department’s projects and field schools in New Zealand. His last tropical Pacific field work was in 1985 on Watom Island, scene of the earliest published discoveries of Lapita pottery. 314 Roger Curtis Green
Retirement for Roger meant more time to concentrate on his research and writing. He cut back on outside commitments as well as relinquishing teaching and administrative roles, and devoted himself to research, but he still found ample time to collaborate with colleagues and encourage younger scholars. Roger had wide interests beyond archaeology; he considered that what he did was culture history. He first became interested in linguistics at New Mexico and Harvard; his early attempts to learn Tahitian and Mangarevan in order to communicate better with his workmen provided the starting point for his interest in the subgrouping and historical reconstruction of Polynesian and other Pacific languages. At Auckland he encouraged colleague Bruce Biggs and student Andrew Pawley to move into historical linguistics. He published influential papers himself on linguistic topics. But Roger was also a great fund raiser and promoter of research. His Western Samoan archaeological project was part of a wider programme of research into Polynesian Prehistory, funded by the US National Science Foundation through the Bishop Museum. In the second stage of this programme, Roger secured funding for two linguistic components: the launch and first few years of development of POLLEX, the Proto Polynesian Lexicon database, and fieldwork by Biggs and students to record little known Polynesian languages, particularly in Polynesian outliers. Similarly, the Southeast Solomon Islands Programme, also funded by the US National Science Foundation through the Bishop Museum, contained a component of primary research on languages in the area encompassed by the programme. Linguistics played an ever increasing role in Roger’s approach to culture history, at times causing controversy with archaeologists who believed that archaeologists should stick to archaeology. The culmination of his approach was the use of data from archaeology, ethnology and comparative linguistics to reconstruct past societies—most notably in his book co-written with Patrick Kirch, Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical Anthropology, of which he was extremely proud. His publications cover a vast field, from basic excavation reports through reviews of individual island sequences to higher level and broader syntheses. He championed the publication of basic data in full, experimenting in earlier years with microfiche publication and more recently embracing electronic means of publishing the raw data that would not be accepted by academic journals. Roger believed in supporting and contributing to academic societies, government organisations and statutory bodies involved in the advancement and funding of archaeology and related disciplines, and the preservation of cultural heritage. He took a leading role in the New Zealand Archaeological Association from his first visit to New Zealand, when he brought his surveying skills to bear on the fledgling Site Recording Scheme and collaborated with Roger Curtis Green 315
Jack Golson on the first Handbook to Site Recording. He served a term as President in the early 1960s and was actively involved in pushing for better protection for archaeological sites from 1963 until the passing of the Historic Places Amendment Act 1975. He served on the Board of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust during the 1970s, when the Trust’s archaeological activities were rapidly expanding in response to the new legislation. True to his conviction that what was published was as important as where it was published, he was a regular contributor to the New Zealand Archaeological Association Newsletter and its successor, Archaeology in New Zealand. Similarly, he was a staunch supporter of the Polynesian Society, serving on its council from 1973 to 1980 and, until his health seriously deteriorated, regularly participating in its annual meetings. Two of his earliest publications on New Zealand and Pacific topics appeared in Volumes 68 and 69 of the Journal of the Polynesian Society. He continued to contribute himself for many years and encouraged students and colleagues to do so too. In later years, he served on the Board of New Zealand’s Foundation for Research Science and Technology and the Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He was President of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association from 1988 to 1992. At the University he played a significant role in university- wide committees and regularly took his turn as Head of the Department of Anthropology. From the time of his early work in the American Southwest, Roger showed respect for the rights of indigenous people. Wherever he worked in the Pacific his relations with his local assistants were mutually congenial, sometimes developing into continuing friendships, and he was conscientious and thorough in his dealings with island administrations. He went out of his way to help students and acquaintances from Pacific communities. He was also a strong supporter of women students and colleagues. Some very able women were among his fellow students at both New Mexico and Harvard and the way they were treated, particularly at Harvard in the 1950s, led him to give specific support to women, especially during his early years in New Zealand. He was married twice and enjoyed strong support from both his wives. He married Kaye Chandler Smith in 1959. She worked with him in the field in Mangareva and Mo‘orea and later, with their two children, accompanied him to both Samoa and the Solomon Islands. He and Kaye separated in the late 70s and in 1984 he married Valerie Sallen. Valerie encouraged him to establish the Green Foundation for Polynesian Research, which supports research by post-graduate students and scholars without easy access to other funding sources. Her constant support enabled him to continue doing what he liked best, research and writing, almost to the end. 316 Roger Curtis Green
Roger was honoured with many awards. He received the Polynesian Society’s Elsdon Best Memorial Medal in 1973 and was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1975. He became a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1984, and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2000. In 1992 he was awarded the Hector Medal—then the Royal Society of New Zealand’s premier award—for his contribution to the field of human sciences in New Zealand. In 2003 he was awarded the Marsden Medal by the New Zealand Association of Scientists for his work in Pacific archaeology and culture history, and in 2007 he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for contributions to New Zealand history.
Janet Davidson